Planned book: Hermann Minkowski and the Reality of Spacetime

[vpetkov at minkowskiinstitute.org]

Dear Colleagues,

If your research is on the philosophy and the nature of time / spacetime, please consider the following

Call for editor(s) and papers:

The Minkowski Institute Press (http://www.minkowskiinstitute.org/mip/books/ <http://www.minkowskiinstitute.org/mip/books/>) will publish the volume "Hermann Minkowski and the Reality of Spacetime" with papers on whether or not Minkowski's arguments in his 1908 lecture (based on the experimental evidence at that time) unambiguously prove that spacetime is real. The only requirement is that all submitted papers must explicitly address Minkowski's arguments. Why? See abstract below.

If interested please contact: mip at minkowskiinstitute.org

Vesselin Petkov
http://spacetimecentre.org/vpetkov/



Why Spacetime is Real

Vesselin Petkov
Minkowski Institute
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
vpetkov at minkowskiinstitute.org

\begin{abstract}
	Publications, which explicitly or implicitly reject the reality of spacetime, have been hampering the advancement of our understanding of the physical world for years. The reason is that they all inexplicably ignore Hermann Minkowski's arguments for the reality of spacetime in his 1908 lecture ``Space and Time'' whose unprecedented strength is that experiments would be \textit{impossible} if the arguments were wrong, i.e., if spacetime were not real (Minkowski's lecture is included as an Appendix). This is inexplicable because we all know well that science does not work in this way -- arguments, especially those firmly based on the experimental evidence (such as Minkowski's arguments), are faced and addressed. That is why any discussions of the nature of spacetime or of time (which unavoidably involve the nature of spacetime as well) must explicitly address Minkowski's arguments for the reality of spacetime. Otherwise, such discussions would be nothing more than insignificant unscientific chats or, at best, exercises in the philosophy of language. Although Minkowski's arguments taken alone unambiguously demonstrate that it does appear to be an experimental fact that the world at the macroscopic level is four-dimensional, i.e., that spacetime is real, I will expand them to other kinematic relativistic effects to make it even more clear why the strength of the arguments is indeed unprecedented. 
\end{abstract}


\section{Introduction}
For more than 10 years I have hoped that I would not have to write such an abstract. Unfortunately, things have been getting from bad to worse. There has been an increase in the publication of views, which directly contradict the relativistic experimental evidence, such as versions of objective becoming and even much worse -- reviving presentism. 
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